'Black Panther' Is $99K Away From One Last Box Office Milestone

Although it lost half of its screens this weekend and now plays in just 28 theaters, Marvel and Walt Disney’s Black Panther is slowly Spectre-ing its way to $700 million domestic. The Chadwick Boseman action drama earned around $15k last weekend to bring its domestic total to $699.901m. So, it is $99,007 away from the once-fabled $700m mark. If it sticks around long enough (and presumably gets a glorified reissue for a week or two in semi-wide release), it’ll be just the latest big movie to be dragged kicking and screaming in protest across an arbitrary box office milestone.

Spectre spent two months (61 days) hovering between $199 million to $200m. The Sony/EON/MGM 007 flick was already a solid hit, earning $881m worldwide alongside The Hunger Games: Mockingjay part II and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But be it luck or happenstance, theaters kept the 007 movie around (perhaps as an adult-skewing counterpoint to the kid-targeted Star Wars and Hunger Games sequels) for long enough to hit the $200m milestone. Sometimes it’s a matter of saving face, as the underperforming Superman Returns spent 36 days between $198m and $200m domestic before ending with just $200.7m total (and $391m worldwide on a $270m budget).

In 2013, Paramount/Viacom Inc. brought Brad Pitt’s World War Z back into theaters over the Labor Day weekend, going from 239 screens to 1,242 screens. And, sure enough, the troubled but successful zombie thriller earned $1.65 million over the four-day weekend to get over the hunch. Again, the horror drama was already a hit, having countered behind-the-scenes horror stories with a $551m global cume on a $190m budget, but Paramount wanted the sexy number for bonuses and/or post-theatrical bragging rights.

Disney put A Wrinkle in Time back into 1,984 screens over Mother’s Day weekend and then expanded just a tough back into 245 screens in mid-June (the opening weekend of Incredibles 2). Allegations of magical math notwithstanding, they got the flick over the $100m domestic mark. The Storm Reid/Oprah Winfrey fantasy didn’t magically turn into a profitable flick ($133m worldwide on a $103m budget), but it did allow for the possibility that every single 2018 Walt Disney release could end up above the $100m domestic mark (if Christopher Robin falls short, Pooh gets punched), which would be a major bragging point.

This isn’t a new thing, not by a longshot. Warner Bros./Time Warner Inc. put Tim Burton’s Batman into 690 theaters in its 14th weekend to get it over the $250 million milestone. To be fair, it doesn’t always do the trick, as Disney’s Gnomeo and Juliet never did get to the $100m mark, having to settle for $99.967m. At that point, you’d think someone would just buy out a handful of theaters for a weekend. The Disney toon (not technically from Walt Disney, Pixar or DisneyToon) was already a big hit without the bragging rights. Ditto (to the 7th power) Black Panther.

Since it earned just $15,000 last weekend, it’s going to take a miracle, a reissue, or an MCU triple feature-type gimmick to get the movie over the $700 million mark. The $200m Ryan Coogler/Joe Robert Cole Marvel drama has earned $1.345 billion worldwide. It’s the biggest comic book superhero movie ever in North America and the fourth-biggest behind only the three Avengers movies worldwide. It will probably be the first superhero movie nominated for Best Picture at next year’s Oscars. It doesn’t need to cross the $700m mark to secure its legacy. But it’s kind of fun watching it try to get there anyway.

In the meantime, Chadwick Boseman just signed the dotted line for 17 Bridges, a modern-day police actioner for STX Entertainment and the Russo brothers. Black Panther’s legacy can’t just be “Daniel Kaluuya should be the next 007!” or “I hope we get an all-female MCU movie!” Will you be “here for it” (“it” being the kind of studio programmer star vehicle that the likes of Ryan Reynolds take for granted) in theaters? Or do you only care about diversity (or fandom of folks like Boseman and Danai Gurira) when it applies to the big franchise movies you were already going to see?

By all means, Wakanda Forever and all that jazz. But I’m sure Mr. Boseman would like plenty of folks to spend their time and money seeing his other movies (Barry Jenkins’ Expatriate comes to mind) in theaters as well. Unless you want him to become a modern-day equivalent of Simon Trent, you should want that too. In the meantime, let’s see how close Black Panther gets to the once-untouchable $700 million mark.

I've studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing s...